Rain forecast for kickoff of 49ers game

Those lucky 49er Faithful with tickets to today’s NFC Championship Game had best brace for rain.

After Saturday’s surprising sunshine, rain will return to the Bay Area by kickoff time, scheduled for 3:30 p.m. So will the wind, which can wreak havoc with passes and kicks in breezy Candlestick Park.

In fact, the storm front could reach Candlestick not long after the opening kickoff.

“Definitely we’ll have light rains at the beginning of game time, possibly changing to moderate or heavier rains during the game,” said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. “And winds will also be a factor. It’s not going to be a kicker’s game.”

Today’s soaker will be the last in a short string of storms that have brought the area its first significant moisture since Thanksgiving, breaking a dry spell of historic proportions.

Since the first storm arrived Thursday, 1.85 inches of rain had fallen on San Francisco as of 4 p.m. Saturday. That’s far more than the 0.14 of an inch the city received in December, San Francisco’s third-driest December on record.

Oakland has recorded 1.87 inches of rain in the last three days, while Santa Rosa counted 3.66 inches. Typically sodden Kentfield received 5.74 inches, according to the Weather Service.

The rains and wind, which gusted as high as 60 mph in some Bay Area hills, contributed to a string of minor power outages Friday night, most of them fixed by Saturday morning. The winds also toppled two eucalyptus trees that fell across Highway 1 in San Mateo County, south of Whitehouse Canyon Road, early Saturday morning and kept the highway closed for several hours.

But the storms haven’t produced significant mudslides or flooding along any Bay Area streams, even though some of the downpours have been intense. The dry ground has been able to absorb the moisture.

Benjamin said most cities around the bay could expect another inch to fall through Monday morning. High temperatures will be in the mid-50s, with winds gusting up to 30 mph.

Then the weather will dry out again, with no rain forecast for the rest of the week. Temperatures in San Francisco will once again push toward 60 degrees, Benjamin said.

“I would not venture to say we’re going into a prolonged dry period,” he said, “but certainly a several-day dry period.”